At a time when many of us are going through a rough patch in our relationship with our national identity, you know what the tonic is? One of those ever-so-charming BBC documentaries shining a light on one of our country’s quirky (and, crucially, non-nationalistic) sub-cultures.

It’s an area that BBC2’s Wonderland documentary series has mined brilliantly over the years and BBC4’s Swim the Channel, about the amateur swimmers who plunge into the freezing waters off the Kent coastline and set off for Calais, felt very much in that strand’s eccentric vein.

“Channel-crossing is not the preserve of the athletic, or the especially committed”

I must say, having never really understood why you’d swim when you could run (slower and more demanding, requires greater co-ordination, makes you wet), I had assumed that such a thankless challenge was the preserve of the odd loon each year.

But at a time when one’s social respectability is in part measured by the number of endurance challenges one commits to, it makes sense that the numbers participating have mushroomed.

Quite the operation

What I had not realised was that there was quite such an operation behind it, with large groups gathering at Dover beach for training sessions through the summer.

Here they are marshalled by their formidable, fag-chuffing volunteer trainer Freda “The General” Streeter, ruling the shingle since 1982 and sure to be played by Julie Walters in a plucky little British comedy at some point in the near future.

The other surprise to me was that the sport of channel-crossing is not the preserve of the athletic, or the especially committed. Of the three people we followed in their attempts, two – student Georgie and ex-army man Al – were likely candidates.

“Mike was the kind of guy who you could more easily imagine downing pints than perfecting his freestyle”

But the other, laid-back Essex geezer Mike, was the kind of guy who you could more easily imagine downing pints than perfecting his freestyle – and duly, we saw him insisting that he would keep drinking right up until the night before his attempt, and wolfing down a KFC on the beach before a training session.

However, he was the one who had succeeded at the challenge multiple times before, and who made it once again, while Al came up short, forced to pull out past halfway due to the swell of the sea.

And then there were the “pilots” – those boat-drivers who volunteered to guide the swimmers, and whose motivation seemed even more opaque.

“You know what they say about channel swimming: from the outside looking in, it’s hard to understand, and from the inside looking out, it’s hard to explain,” pontificated a veteran pilot also by the name of Mike.

But the human warmth on display here, and the sense of community this peculiar practice engendered, at least went some way to explaining it.

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